SOVIET AIDES SAY DEATHS IN QUAKE MAY REACH 50,000

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With dramatic new accounts of the Armenian earthquake reaching Moscow, officials said today that the death toll could reach 50,000 and that 400,000 people had been left homeless.

Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, returned to Moscow early today from New York, cutting short a foreign trip, to take command of the relief and reconstruction efforts. The efforts involve dozens of government agencies, the military, volunteers and aid from abroad.

Two days after the quake, rescue workers continued to hear voices from the ruins today, the Soviet television reported, and people searched amid twisted girders and fallen buildings for missing family members. Local Officials Criticized

A Politburo commission created to deal with the quake, one of the worst in Soviet history, today criticized local officials as being too slow to provide temporary shelters and food distribution points for the victims.

For the first time since the quake struck on Wednesday, newspapers published the chilling accounts of people who were rescued. One of them, Zhenya Saakyan, told the Government newspaper Izvestia how her son saw her hand sticking out as she lay pinned under the ruins of her office.

''I just recall how he was crying, 'Mommy, give me your hands,' '' she said. ''My son pulled me out, and I am alive.'' Another son was killed, she said, and a third was missing. Minister's Estimate of Deaths

Health Minister Yevgeny I. Chazov told representatives of government relief commissions that he believed about 50,000 people had been killed in the quake, according to Stepan K. Pogosyan, director of Armenpress, the official press agency in the Soviet republic.

The Soviet authorities have released no official death toll, saying the chaos of the quake and the rescue efforts hampered their ability to judge the exact scope of the disaster, which occurred in an area with a population of about 700,000.

Some unofficial reports from Armenia have spoken of more than 100,000 deaths, while the Soviet Ambassador to Britain, Leonid M. Zamyatin, put the number at about 80,000. Foreign Press Trip Planned

Foreign reporters in Moscow have had to rely on official reports and on phone calls to the area, and have not been permitted to travel there. A small group of foreign reporters is scheduled to travel there Saturday.

Soviet officials said it was not clear when Mr. Gorbachev would go to the scene of the quake. They said he would first organize and evaluate relief efforts from Moscow. Mr. Gorbachev has made no public statement since his return, and his arrival in Moscow was not broadcast on the television evening news.

The earthquake affected an area of Armenia, near the Turkish border, that is rated as highly prone to seismic activity. Shocks from the quake were felt as far north as Tbilisi, the capital of Soviet Georgia, and west to the Azerbaijani capital of Baku. Scientists said the region continued to register minor tremors that could be expected to last for up to six months.

Aid for the victims has been pouring in from around the country - offerings of food, medical supplies, blood and volunteers - and the Government appears to be hoping that the disaster will serve as a unifying event in a country that has increasingly become splintered along ethnic lines. The Government declared Saturday a national day of mourning, with all public entertainment canceled. Ethnic tension between Armenia and neighboring Azerbaijan has caused dozens of deaths in the last year, and the army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda reported that on the day of the earthquake, three people were killed by militia forces after gangs rampaged through a town in Azerbaijan.

The military commandant in Baku also announced today that five homes had been set afire there and that five people had been arrested for burglary.

Armenian sources said the violence had been committed against ethnic Armenians by Azerbaijanis exploiting the reduction of troops, who had been brought in to maintain civil order and were partly redeployed to help in the earthquake relief. Officials said they had no evidence that the violence was ethnically related.

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Mostly, Soviet people from all the republics, including Azerbaijan, appear to be joining efforts to help the victims of the quake, clearly moved by the dramatic footage they have seen on television and the agonizing reports in the press.

The Moscow evening news program Vremya showed one distraught man, standing in a pile of wood and concrete, pointing to the charred rubble that had been the kitchen where his brother was eating lunch when the quake struck. The brother had not been found. Nearby, the man said, gesturing, they had just pulled out the body of his father.

The man then looked back at the place where his brother had been. ''You couldn't keep breathing down there for so many days,'' he said, his voice choked. ''Oh, the grief is horrible.'' 'Like a Slow-Motion Movie'

Armenians interviewed by Izvestia described in gripping simplicity the terror of the first moments of the quake.

''It was like a slow-motion movie,'' said Ruzanna Grigoryan, who was working at the stocking factory in Leninakan, the republic's second-largest city, when the building began to tremble. ''There was a concrete panel slowly falling down.''

Trapped under the collapsed building, she said, she battled to free herself. ''I used every piece of concrete, every rod, and I was pulling myself out centimeter by centimeter,'' she said. ''Then I found out that I had been doing this for four hours.''

Sofiya Nadoyan was with a friend when the earth rumbled and the building they were in began to crumble around them. Suddenly, there was complete darkness.

''I thought that the night had come,'' she said. ''I did not know in what world I was then, still in this one or the other one already.'' She has still not found her friend. Many Offers From Abroad

Reports of the tragedy affected not only Soviet citizens, but also private people, companies and governments around the world as they sent messages of condolence and offers of all kinds of help.

Soviet officials said they were sorting through the offers to determine what was most urgently needed.

The official press agency Tass reported that among the aid already accepted were 11 infra-red detectors sent from Britain to help locate people still trapped in the rubble. The French Government sent 147 firemen, 22 doctors and 12 dogs specially trained to detect humans. Finland sent a planeload of antibiotics.

While the rescuers carry on their work, many of the survivors remain, reluctant to leave behind their homes and relatives they have yet to find.

''They don't want to leave before all the ruins are cleared,'' said Lev Voznesensky, chief of the Government Information Department. ''They want to wait until all the people are unearthed so they can bid farewell to their relatives.''

A version of this article appears in print on December 10, 1988, on Page 1001001 of the National edition with the headline: SOVIET AIDES SAY DEATHS IN QUAKE MAY REACH 50,000. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe